Timothy Larsen
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- January 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199287871
- eISBN:
- 9780191713422
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199287871.003.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Theology
This chapter documents the way that the theme of Victorian crisis of faith has become vastly overblown in general histories of the period, textbooks, literary studies, and intellectual history. It ...
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This chapter documents the way that the theme of Victorian crisis of faith has become vastly overblown in general histories of the period, textbooks, literary studies, and intellectual history. It recounts the main studies that have established this theme from Basil Willey to A. N. Wilson, and casts the Victorian crisis of faith as a by-product of the evangelicalism and general religiosity of the age.Less
This chapter documents the way that the theme of Victorian crisis of faith has become vastly overblown in general histories of the period, textbooks, literary studies, and intellectual history. It recounts the main studies that have established this theme from Basil Willey to A. N. Wilson, and casts the Victorian crisis of faith as a by-product of the evangelicalism and general religiosity of the age.
Howard Felperin
- Published in print:
- 1992
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198122654
- eISBN:
- 9780191671517
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198122654.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
The critical school of ‘new historicism’ is very much at the centre of contemporary debates on literary studies and theory. Much ‘new historicist’ writing has focused ...
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The critical school of ‘new historicism’ is very much at the centre of contemporary debates on literary studies and theory. Much ‘new historicist’ writing has focused on Renaissance texts, and this book is a timely exploration of that connection and its significance for ‘English’ as a whole. This book subjects many of the most challenging claims of ‘new historicism’ to rigorous analysis, distinguishes sharply between its American and British versions, and probes the causes and consequences of its politicization of literary studies. The philosophical as well as political issues central to current debates are examined and the uses served by the canonical texts at their centre analysed within a broad cultural and historical perspective. This searching reconsideration of contemporary critical theory and practice yields fresh readings of a number of classic texts — including those of William Shakespeare's Sonnets, Thomas More's Utopia, John Donne's poetry, and Robert Conrad's Heart of Darkness — as well as a deepened understanding of the complex and changing functions of the canon itself.Less
The critical school of ‘new historicism’ is very much at the centre of contemporary debates on literary studies and theory. Much ‘new historicist’ writing has focused on Renaissance texts, and this book is a timely exploration of that connection and its significance for ‘English’ as a whole. This book subjects many of the most challenging claims of ‘new historicism’ to rigorous analysis, distinguishes sharply between its American and British versions, and probes the causes and consequences of its politicization of literary studies. The philosophical as well as political issues central to current debates are examined and the uses served by the canonical texts at their centre analysed within a broad cultural and historical perspective. This searching reconsideration of contemporary critical theory and practice yields fresh readings of a number of classic texts — including those of William Shakespeare's Sonnets, Thomas More's Utopia, John Donne's poetry, and Robert Conrad's Heart of Darkness — as well as a deepened understanding of the complex and changing functions of the canon itself.
Stephen Mulhall
- Published in print:
- 1999
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198238508
- eISBN:
- 9780191679643
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198238508.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, History of Philosophy, Aesthetics
The author of the book presents a full-length philosophical study of the work of Stanley Cavell, best known for his highly influential contributions to the fields of film studies, Shakespearian ...
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The author of the book presents a full-length philosophical study of the work of Stanley Cavell, best known for his highly influential contributions to the fields of film studies, Shakespearian literary criticism, and the confluence of psychoanalysis and literary theory. It is not properly appreciated that Cavell's project originated in his interpretation of Austin's and Wittgenstein's philosophical interest in the criteria governing ordinary language, and is given unity by an abiding concern with the nature and the varying cultural manifestations of the sceptical impulse in modernity. This book elucidates the essentially philosophical roots and trajectory of Cavell's work, traces its links with Romanticism and its recent turn towards a species of moral pefectionism associated with Thoreau and Emerson, and concludes with an assessment of its relations to liberal-democratic political theory, Christian religious thought, and feminist literary studies.Less
The author of the book presents a full-length philosophical study of the work of Stanley Cavell, best known for his highly influential contributions to the fields of film studies, Shakespearian literary criticism, and the confluence of psychoanalysis and literary theory. It is not properly appreciated that Cavell's project originated in his interpretation of Austin's and Wittgenstein's philosophical interest in the criteria governing ordinary language, and is given unity by an abiding concern with the nature and the varying cultural manifestations of the sceptical impulse in modernity. This book elucidates the essentially philosophical roots and trajectory of Cavell's work, traces its links with Romanticism and its recent turn towards a species of moral pefectionism associated with Thoreau and Emerson, and concludes with an assessment of its relations to liberal-democratic political theory, Christian religious thought, and feminist literary studies.
Paul Giles
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691136134
- eISBN:
- 9781400836512
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691136134.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This concluding chapter argues that global remapping of American literature involves drawing attention to the contingent and historically variable nature of narratives about the relation of America ...
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This concluding chapter argues that global remapping of American literature involves drawing attention to the contingent and historically variable nature of narratives about the relation of America to the rest of the world. It contends that to reconceive American literary studies in global terms is not to reject the significance of spatial location or corporeal embodiment but to make place contingent. It also challenges the idea that a commitment to liberal democracy should be a prerequisite of American studies scholarship. Rather than associating globalization merely with a triumph of flattened market forces and a wholesale rejection of aesthetic values, the chapter suggests that it would be more valuable to consider ways in which social forces of all kinds can represent illuminating lacunae within literary texts, of the kind that have always been accessible to careful critical scrutiny.Less
This concluding chapter argues that global remapping of American literature involves drawing attention to the contingent and historically variable nature of narratives about the relation of America to the rest of the world. It contends that to reconceive American literary studies in global terms is not to reject the significance of spatial location or corporeal embodiment but to make place contingent. It also challenges the idea that a commitment to liberal democracy should be a prerequisite of American studies scholarship. Rather than associating globalization merely with a triumph of flattened market forces and a wholesale rejection of aesthetic values, the chapter suggests that it would be more valuable to consider ways in which social forces of all kinds can represent illuminating lacunae within literary texts, of the kind that have always been accessible to careful critical scrutiny.
Margaret Litvin
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691137803
- eISBN:
- 9781400840106
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691137803.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This introductory chapter summarizes the journey of Shakespeare's Hamlet through the post-1952 Arab world and discusses this study's contributions to Arab politics and literary studies in general. ...
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This introductory chapter summarizes the journey of Shakespeare's Hamlet through the post-1952 Arab world and discusses this study's contributions to Arab politics and literary studies in general. Here, the chapter shows how the character Hamlet's central concern is the problem of historical agency. He asks what it means “to be” rather than “not to be” in a world where “the time is out of joint” and one's very existence as a historical actor is threatened. He thus encapsulates a debate coeval with and largely constitutive of modern Arab identity: the problem of self-determination and authenticity. Following Hamlet's Arab journey, the chapter attempts to clarify one of the most central and widely misunderstood preoccupations of modern Arab politics.Less
This introductory chapter summarizes the journey of Shakespeare's Hamlet through the post-1952 Arab world and discusses this study's contributions to Arab politics and literary studies in general. Here, the chapter shows how the character Hamlet's central concern is the problem of historical agency. He asks what it means “to be” rather than “not to be” in a world where “the time is out of joint” and one's very existence as a historical actor is threatened. He thus encapsulates a debate coeval with and largely constitutive of modern Arab identity: the problem of self-determination and authenticity. Following Hamlet's Arab journey, the chapter attempts to clarify one of the most central and widely misunderstood preoccupations of modern Arab politics.
Longley Edna
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780197263129
- eISBN:
- 9780191734861
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197263129.003.0013
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
This chapter comments on Keith Robbins' lecture on the history of Ireland, Scotland and Wales. It commends Robbins' remarkable historical overview, particularly his summation ‘a multilateral set of ...
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This chapter comments on Keith Robbins' lecture on the history of Ireland, Scotland and Wales. It commends Robbins' remarkable historical overview, particularly his summation ‘a multilateral set of political and cultural configurations which criss-cross the Isles’. It discusses Robbins' problematic of Ireland/Scotland/Wales in the context of Northern Irish and Anglophone literary studies. It also highlights the importance of studying Northern Irish writing and Northern Ireland or Ulster.Less
This chapter comments on Keith Robbins' lecture on the history of Ireland, Scotland and Wales. It commends Robbins' remarkable historical overview, particularly his summation ‘a multilateral set of political and cultural configurations which criss-cross the Isles’. It discusses Robbins' problematic of Ireland/Scotland/Wales in the context of Northern Irish and Anglophone literary studies. It also highlights the importance of studying Northern Irish writing and Northern Ireland or Ulster.
Jerome J. McGann
- Published in print:
- 1988
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780198117506
- eISBN:
- 9780191670961
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198117506.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The first chapter demonstrates the fundamental importance of textual studies to hermeneutics generally and to the specific act of criticism in particular. It assumes that literary study surrendered ...
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The first chapter demonstrates the fundamental importance of textual studies to hermeneutics generally and to the specific act of criticism in particular. It assumes that literary study surrendered some of its most powerful interpretive tools when it allowed textual criticism and bibliography to be regarded as ‘preliminary’ rather than integral to the study of literary work. It argues that the non-integral view of textual criticism and bibliography is historically explicable. It also attempts both an exposition of this view of textual criticism and bibliography as well as a critique of its limits.Less
The first chapter demonstrates the fundamental importance of textual studies to hermeneutics generally and to the specific act of criticism in particular. It assumes that literary study surrendered some of its most powerful interpretive tools when it allowed textual criticism and bibliography to be regarded as ‘preliminary’ rather than integral to the study of literary work. It argues that the non-integral view of textual criticism and bibliography is historically explicable. It also attempts both an exposition of this view of textual criticism and bibliography as well as a critique of its limits.
Hugh Grady
- Published in print:
- 1994
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198183228
- eISBN:
- 9780191673962
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198183228.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Shakespeare Studies, Criticism/Theory
This introductory chapter sets out the purpose of the book, which is to make use of the unique qualities of Shakespeare criticism in order to investigate and clarify the institutions and cultural ...
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This introductory chapter sets out the purpose of the book, which is to make use of the unique qualities of Shakespeare criticism in order to investigate and clarify the institutions and cultural forms which produce it, as well as the vast outpourings of the entire professionalized literary-critical enterprise in the modern world. It discusses the theoretical framework employed in the book and its relation to similar attempts at cultural theory in contemporary literary studies.Less
This introductory chapter sets out the purpose of the book, which is to make use of the unique qualities of Shakespeare criticism in order to investigate and clarify the institutions and cultural forms which produce it, as well as the vast outpourings of the entire professionalized literary-critical enterprise in the modern world. It discusses the theoretical framework employed in the book and its relation to similar attempts at cultural theory in contemporary literary studies.
Fran Brearton
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780197263518
- eISBN:
- 9780191734021
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197263518.003.0010
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
This lecture discusses The White Goddess, a novel written by Robert Graves that was first published in May 1948. It is an intellectual and difficult book that has a toehold in many academic ...
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This lecture discusses The White Goddess, a novel written by Robert Graves that was first published in May 1948. It is an intellectual and difficult book that has a toehold in many academic disciplines, including anthropology, literary studies, and Celtic studies. As an author, Graves has been described as the ‘bard’ of ‘an alternative society’ and as a ‘a unique figure in British literary life’. The lecture determines that The White Goddess can be both a help and a hindrance when it comes to looking at Graves' life and work. It also presents the literary techniques Graves used in the novel.Less
This lecture discusses The White Goddess, a novel written by Robert Graves that was first published in May 1948. It is an intellectual and difficult book that has a toehold in many academic disciplines, including anthropology, literary studies, and Celtic studies. As an author, Graves has been described as the ‘bard’ of ‘an alternative society’ and as a ‘a unique figure in British literary life’. The lecture determines that The White Goddess can be both a help and a hindrance when it comes to looking at Graves' life and work. It also presents the literary techniques Graves used in the novel.
Bernard Bergonzi
- Published in print:
- 1991
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198112617
- eISBN:
- 9780191670817
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198112617.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter discusses the highs and lows of the academy over the years, noting that academic literary study was divided between those who saw it as inevitably involved with making judgments and ...
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This chapter discusses the highs and lows of the academy over the years, noting that academic literary study was divided between those who saw it as inevitably involved with making judgments and those who did not. One of the conclusions made at the end of the chapter is that the book has been a commodity ever since the moment it was invented. Literary criticism is now just one more academic specialism that is produced and consumed within the academy.Less
This chapter discusses the highs and lows of the academy over the years, noting that academic literary study was divided between those who saw it as inevitably involved with making judgments and those who did not. One of the conclusions made at the end of the chapter is that the book has been a commodity ever since the moment it was invented. Literary criticism is now just one more academic specialism that is produced and consumed within the academy.
Bernard Bergonzi
- Published in print:
- 1991
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198112617
- eISBN:
- 9780191670817
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198112617.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter discusses Lewis and Leavis, who were the dominant figures in literary study in the middle decades of the twentieth century. When set in the cultural context in which the present book was ...
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This chapter discusses Lewis and Leavis, who were the dominant figures in literary study in the middle decades of the twentieth century. When set in the cultural context in which the present book was written, it is Lewis's arguments and assumptions that seem to be the more challenging and which have something to contribute to contemporary debates.Less
This chapter discusses Lewis and Leavis, who were the dominant figures in literary study in the middle decades of the twentieth century. When set in the cultural context in which the present book was written, it is Lewis's arguments and assumptions that seem to be the more challenging and which have something to contribute to contemporary debates.
A. D. H. Mayes (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- April 2004
- ISBN:
- 9780198263913
- eISBN:
- 9780191601187
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0198263910.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Biblical Studies
This book is a collection of essays by members of the Society for Old Testament Study, and reviews new approaches and major developments in established approaches to Old Testament study over a wide ...
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This book is a collection of essays by members of the Society for Old Testament Study, and reviews new approaches and major developments in established approaches to Old Testament study over a wide range of topics. The scholarly study of the Old Testament is now marked by a rich diversity of approaches and concerns. In the last two decades of the twentieth century, an interest in the text and the implications for its interpretation of the fact that it is no longer the preserve of a single scholarly community have become central, while the reconstruction of the history of the people from whom it derived has been transformed by new methods. The Society for Old Testament Study decided that this latest volume in its series of its publications should reflect these changes and have a particular concentration on literary and historical study. In doing so, it has not only clearly recognized the diversity now inherent in Old Testament study but has also welcomed the integration into its field of the wide range of approaches available in current literary and historical investigation. The title, arrangement, and content of the present volume reflect these developments. The study of the biblical text and how it is received and interpreted by its various readerships has a certain logical priority over the study of its historical background and authorship, yet an ongoing investigation of issues relating to the latter cannot await definitive conclusions on the former. So, in the book, essays on the text and its reception discuss primary issues that arise in Old Testament study, while those on background and authorship reflect the continued vitality of, and the fresh perspectives possible in, more traditional scholarly concerns. The book is arranged in three parts: I The Old Testament and the Reader (5 chapters); II The Text of the Old Testament (5 chapters); and III The Old Testament and its authors (6 chapters).Less
This book is a collection of essays by members of the Society for Old Testament Study, and reviews new approaches and major developments in established approaches to Old Testament study over a wide range of topics. The scholarly study of the Old Testament is now marked by a rich diversity of approaches and concerns. In the last two decades of the twentieth century, an interest in the text and the implications for its interpretation of the fact that it is no longer the preserve of a single scholarly community have become central, while the reconstruction of the history of the people from whom it derived has been transformed by new methods. The Society for Old Testament Study decided that this latest volume in its series of its publications should reflect these changes and have a particular concentration on literary and historical study. In doing so, it has not only clearly recognized the diversity now inherent in Old Testament study but has also welcomed the integration into its field of the wide range of approaches available in current literary and historical investigation. The title, arrangement, and content of the present volume reflect these developments. The study of the biblical text and how it is received and interpreted by its various readerships has a certain logical priority over the study of its historical background and authorship, yet an ongoing investigation of issues relating to the latter cannot await definitive conclusions on the former. So, in the book, essays on the text and its reception discuss primary issues that arise in Old Testament study, while those on background and authorship reflect the continued vitality of, and the fresh perspectives possible in, more traditional scholarly concerns. The book is arranged in three parts: I The Old Testament and the Reader (5 chapters); II The Text of the Old Testament (5 chapters); and III The Old Testament and its authors (6 chapters).
Jerome J. McGann
- Published in print:
- 1988
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780198117506
- eISBN:
- 9780191670961
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198117506.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Textual criticism, in the traditional sense, is an analytic discipline separated into two provinces, the so-called Lower and Higher Criticism. Its practitioners are those guardians of the dry bones, ...
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Textual criticism, in the traditional sense, is an analytic discipline separated into two provinces, the so-called Lower and Higher Criticism. Its practitioners are those guardians of the dry bones, the editors, bibliograpliers, and philologists of various sorts who are best known to the ordinary student of literature for the work they do not do: that is, interpretation and literary criticism. To study literature in the contexts of its origins and its later historical development is to free the reader from the ignorance of his presentness. There can be no present or future, in life or in art, if the past is not a living reality in its pastness. Editors, bibliographers, textual critics, and pedants of all sorts hold the keys in their hands, the keys to the kingdom not merely of literature, but of all human culture.Less
Textual criticism, in the traditional sense, is an analytic discipline separated into two provinces, the so-called Lower and Higher Criticism. Its practitioners are those guardians of the dry bones, the editors, bibliograpliers, and philologists of various sorts who are best known to the ordinary student of literature for the work they do not do: that is, interpretation and literary criticism. To study literature in the contexts of its origins and its later historical development is to free the reader from the ignorance of his presentness. There can be no present or future, in life or in art, if the past is not a living reality in its pastness. Editors, bibliographers, textual critics, and pedants of all sorts hold the keys in their hands, the keys to the kingdom not merely of literature, but of all human culture.
Caroline Levine
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691160627
- eISBN:
- 9781400852604
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691160627.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter offers a surprising, even counterintuitive, paradigm for bringing all four major forms together. HBO's recent television series, The Wire (2002–2008), conceptualizes social life as both ...
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This chapter offers a surprising, even counterintuitive, paradigm for bringing all four major forms together. HBO's recent television series, The Wire (2002–2008), conceptualizes social life as both structured and rendered radically unpredictable by large numbers of colliding social forms, including bounded wholes, rhythms, hierarchies, and networks. Dependent on a narrative logic that traces the effects of each formal encounter on the next, it refuses to posit a deep, prior, metaphysical model of causality to explain its world. By tracking vast numbers of social patterns as they meet, reroute, and disrupt one another, The Wire examines the world that results from a plurality of forms at work. It is argued that this series could provide a new model for literary and cultural studies scholarship.Less
This chapter offers a surprising, even counterintuitive, paradigm for bringing all four major forms together. HBO's recent television series, The Wire (2002–2008), conceptualizes social life as both structured and rendered radically unpredictable by large numbers of colliding social forms, including bounded wholes, rhythms, hierarchies, and networks. Dependent on a narrative logic that traces the effects of each formal encounter on the next, it refuses to posit a deep, prior, metaphysical model of causality to explain its world. By tracking vast numbers of social patterns as they meet, reroute, and disrupt one another, The Wire examines the world that results from a plurality of forms at work. It is argued that this series could provide a new model for literary and cultural studies scholarship.
Vita Daphna Arbel
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199837779
- eISBN:
- 9780199932351
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199837779.003.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Early Christian Studies
The introduction provides background on the GLAE’s relations to Genesis 2–4, and on its text-forms, editions, translations, provenance, and scholarship, including previous scholarly treatments of ...
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The introduction provides background on the GLAE’s relations to Genesis 2–4, and on its text-forms, editions, translations, provenance, and scholarship, including previous scholarly treatments of Eve. It presents the importance, popularity, and influence of the GLAE in antiquity and beyond, as a means of placing the discussion in the book within a broader context of value and influence. The introduction further discusses methodological perspectives employed in the book, including those developed in literary studies, cultural-historical studies, social sciences, and gender/feminist studies and the value of such methodologies for this investigation. Finally, it provides a brief outline of as a whole, including the content of each chapter, the book’s conclusions, and the implications that can be drawn from the overall discussion.Less
The introduction provides background on the GLAE’s relations to Genesis 2–4, and on its text-forms, editions, translations, provenance, and scholarship, including previous scholarly treatments of Eve. It presents the importance, popularity, and influence of the GLAE in antiquity and beyond, as a means of placing the discussion in the book within a broader context of value and influence. The introduction further discusses methodological perspectives employed in the book, including those developed in literary studies, cultural-historical studies, social sciences, and gender/feminist studies and the value of such methodologies for this investigation. Finally, it provides a brief outline of as a whole, including the content of each chapter, the book’s conclusions, and the implications that can be drawn from the overall discussion.
Benjamin Schreier
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781479868681
- eISBN:
- 9781479888436
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479868681.003.0002
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
This chapter focuses on the nationalist identitarianism underwriting the current academic isolation of the historicist mainstream of Jewish American literary practice. It first considers the Jewish ...
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This chapter focuses on the nationalist identitarianism underwriting the current academic isolation of the historicist mainstream of Jewish American literary practice. It first considers the Jewish problem as the problem of “Jewishness” before turning to a discussion of the Jewish identity that underwrites Jewish American literature and how a critical vocabulary capable of liberating Jewish American literary study from the historicist criterion can be developed. It then explores how the specific academic history of Jews and their studies has enabled identitarianism to hinder a critical theorization of the identity of Jewish American literature. It also examines how Jewish literary study can articulate itself in an analytical vector that aims to secure Jewishness as a legible object of both scrutiny and practice, a vector it calls “semitism.” The chapter concludes by noting the importance of the genealogy of the historicism of currently ascendant professional languages of identity in “semitic” literary criticism.Less
This chapter focuses on the nationalist identitarianism underwriting the current academic isolation of the historicist mainstream of Jewish American literary practice. It first considers the Jewish problem as the problem of “Jewishness” before turning to a discussion of the Jewish identity that underwrites Jewish American literature and how a critical vocabulary capable of liberating Jewish American literary study from the historicist criterion can be developed. It then explores how the specific academic history of Jews and their studies has enabled identitarianism to hinder a critical theorization of the identity of Jewish American literature. It also examines how Jewish literary study can articulate itself in an analytical vector that aims to secure Jewishness as a legible object of both scrutiny and practice, a vector it calls “semitism.” The chapter concludes by noting the importance of the genealogy of the historicism of currently ascendant professional languages of identity in “semitic” literary criticism.
Suzanne Keen
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195175769
- eISBN:
- 9780199851232
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195175769.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This book presents an account of the relationships among novel reading, empathy, and altruism. Though readers' and authors' empathy certainly contribute to the emotional resonance of fiction and its ...
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This book presents an account of the relationships among novel reading, empathy, and altruism. Though readers' and authors' empathy certainly contribute to the emotional resonance of fiction and its success in the marketplace, this book finds the case for altruistic consequences of novel reading inconclusive. It offers instead a detailed theory of narrative empathy, with proposals about its deployment by novelists and its results in readers. The book engages with neuroscience and contemporary psychological research on empathy, bringing affect to the center of cognitive literary studies' scrutiny of narrative fiction. Drawing on narrative theory, literary history, philosophy, and contemporary scholarship in discourse processing, the book brings together resources and challenges for the literary study of empathy and the psychological study of fiction reading. Empathy robustly enters into affective responses to fiction, but its proper role in shaping the behavior of emotional readers has been debated for three centuries. The book surveys these debates and offers a series of hypotheses about literary empathy, including narrative techniques inviting empathetic response. It argues that above all readers' perception of a text's fictiveness increases the likelihood of readers' empathy, by releasing readers from their guarded responses to the demands of real others. The book confirms the centrality of narrative empathy as a strategy, as well as a subject, of contemporary novelists. Despite the disrepute of putative human universals, novelists from around the world endorse the notion of shared human emotions when they overtly call upon their readers' empathy. Consequently, the book suggests, if narrative empathy is to be better understood, women's reading and popular fiction must be accorded the respect of experimental inquiry.Less
This book presents an account of the relationships among novel reading, empathy, and altruism. Though readers' and authors' empathy certainly contribute to the emotional resonance of fiction and its success in the marketplace, this book finds the case for altruistic consequences of novel reading inconclusive. It offers instead a detailed theory of narrative empathy, with proposals about its deployment by novelists and its results in readers. The book engages with neuroscience and contemporary psychological research on empathy, bringing affect to the center of cognitive literary studies' scrutiny of narrative fiction. Drawing on narrative theory, literary history, philosophy, and contemporary scholarship in discourse processing, the book brings together resources and challenges for the literary study of empathy and the psychological study of fiction reading. Empathy robustly enters into affective responses to fiction, but its proper role in shaping the behavior of emotional readers has been debated for three centuries. The book surveys these debates and offers a series of hypotheses about literary empathy, including narrative techniques inviting empathetic response. It argues that above all readers' perception of a text's fictiveness increases the likelihood of readers' empathy, by releasing readers from their guarded responses to the demands of real others. The book confirms the centrality of narrative empathy as a strategy, as well as a subject, of contemporary novelists. Despite the disrepute of putative human universals, novelists from around the world endorse the notion of shared human emotions when they overtly call upon their readers' empathy. Consequently, the book suggests, if narrative empathy is to be better understood, women's reading and popular fiction must be accorded the respect of experimental inquiry.
Benjamin Schreier
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781479868681
- eISBN:
- 9781479888436
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479868681.003.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
This book explores how Jewish American literary study has alienated itself—in the form of insiderism, trivialization, and ghettoization—compared to American studies and ethnic American literary ...
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This book explores how Jewish American literary study has alienated itself—in the form of insiderism, trivialization, and ghettoization—compared to American studies and ethnic American literary formations. It examines the lines of relation and mutuality between Jewish American literary study and those institutional establishments from which it persists in isolation, such as American studies, multicultural and multiethnic studies, critical theory, and Jewish studies. It also considers the Jewishness that anchors the field of Jewish American literature specifically and Jewish studies more generally, along with multiple and often discontinuous histories and agents accounting for the field's ghettoization. The book employs a literary critical concept of Jewishness to reveal the history, meaning, and power of Jewish identity and articulates a concept of particularity for the study of identity that is neither positivistically opposed to some ontological concept of universality nor grounded in what is inevitably nationalized and biologized ethnic self-evidence.Less
This book explores how Jewish American literary study has alienated itself—in the form of insiderism, trivialization, and ghettoization—compared to American studies and ethnic American literary formations. It examines the lines of relation and mutuality between Jewish American literary study and those institutional establishments from which it persists in isolation, such as American studies, multicultural and multiethnic studies, critical theory, and Jewish studies. It also considers the Jewishness that anchors the field of Jewish American literature specifically and Jewish studies more generally, along with multiple and often discontinuous histories and agents accounting for the field's ghettoization. The book employs a literary critical concept of Jewishness to reveal the history, meaning, and power of Jewish identity and articulates a concept of particularity for the study of identity that is neither positivistically opposed to some ontological concept of universality nor grounded in what is inevitably nationalized and biologized ethnic self-evidence.
Adam Piette
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748635276
- eISBN:
- 9780748651771
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748635276.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This book is a study of the psychological and cultural impact of the Cold War on the imaginations of citizens in the UK and US. It examines writers working at the hazy borders between aesthetic ...
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This book is a study of the psychological and cultural impact of the Cold War on the imaginations of citizens in the UK and US. It examines writers working at the hazy borders between aesthetic project and political allegory, with specific attention being paid to Vladimir Nabokov and Graham Greene as Cold War writers. The book looks at the special relationship as a form of paranoid plotline governing key Anglo-American texts from Storm Jameson to Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, as well as examining the figure of the non-aligned neutral observer caught up in the sacrificial triangles structuring Cold War fantasy. The book aims to consolidate and define a new emergent field in literary studies, the literary Cold War, following the lead of prominent historians of the period. It looks at leading Anglo-American writers in terms of the Cold War as a psychological and fantasy phenomenon. It provides significant readings of key post-war writers.Less
This book is a study of the psychological and cultural impact of the Cold War on the imaginations of citizens in the UK and US. It examines writers working at the hazy borders between aesthetic project and political allegory, with specific attention being paid to Vladimir Nabokov and Graham Greene as Cold War writers. The book looks at the special relationship as a form of paranoid plotline governing key Anglo-American texts from Storm Jameson to Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, as well as examining the figure of the non-aligned neutral observer caught up in the sacrificial triangles structuring Cold War fantasy. The book aims to consolidate and define a new emergent field in literary studies, the literary Cold War, following the lead of prominent historians of the period. It looks at leading Anglo-American writers in terms of the Cold War as a psychological and fantasy phenomenon. It provides significant readings of key post-war writers.
Nancy Glazener
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199390137
- eISBN:
- 9780199390151
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199390137.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
This chapter examines literary studies, starting with the ways in which the constitution of literature made study an important outgrowth of literary reading. It offers a map of Shakespeare studies in ...
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This chapter examines literary studies, starting with the ways in which the constitution of literature made study an important outgrowth of literary reading. It offers a map of Shakespeare studies in U.S. literary culture and examines some of the ideological investments that the United States brought to Shakespeare. The legacies of rhetoric and philology, two other important predecessors of literature, are especially important to literary studies. Taking up the vexed question of why rhetoric, so prominent in academic culture at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was barely visible in the research university model at the end, the chapter argues that the cultural dependence on print and fears of cultural manipulation that had gathered around oratory had moved rhetoric out of prominence before the research university model took hold. The fears of oratorical manipulation were not really justified but point to the tremendous anxieties about autonomy at stake in both oratory and literature, which open the self to outside influences; theories of the sublime also navigated these anxieties. The chapter ends by profiling Coleridge’s and Emerson’s competing models of literary authority and literary reading, which in broad strokes count as modern and antimodern.Less
This chapter examines literary studies, starting with the ways in which the constitution of literature made study an important outgrowth of literary reading. It offers a map of Shakespeare studies in U.S. literary culture and examines some of the ideological investments that the United States brought to Shakespeare. The legacies of rhetoric and philology, two other important predecessors of literature, are especially important to literary studies. Taking up the vexed question of why rhetoric, so prominent in academic culture at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was barely visible in the research university model at the end, the chapter argues that the cultural dependence on print and fears of cultural manipulation that had gathered around oratory had moved rhetoric out of prominence before the research university model took hold. The fears of oratorical manipulation were not really justified but point to the tremendous anxieties about autonomy at stake in both oratory and literature, which open the self to outside influences; theories of the sublime also navigated these anxieties. The chapter ends by profiling Coleridge’s and Emerson’s competing models of literary authority and literary reading, which in broad strokes count as modern and antimodern.
